"Gumgum, please sit down," begged her daughter. "You are only upsetting everything," and she laid an unfilial hand upon her mother's arm.
"I am going to roast a potato," Mrs. Norris cried, shaking herself free and seizing upon a pared potato. "Tommy, get me a stick."
"Isn't she awful," laughed Mary. "Don't you dare give her a stick, Tom." But Tom did dare, and Mrs. Norris, with her smiling benignity, stood waving the stick back and forth over the fire in time with the andante movement of her favourite Brahms sonata.
"Well, we might as well get ready to eat that old stuff," said Nancy to Furbush. "Don't you dread it?"
"I would not dread it, dear, so much, dreaded I not mother more," he replied, to Mary's intense gratification. But Tom, who heard the low-spoken words, thought them decidedly forced and disliked Furbush the more for them.
Furbush's presence was undoubtedly a drawback to Tom's pleasure. How could he be natural with a person whom he disliked as much as he did Furbush and who he knew disliked him? Besides, he did not feel like being sprightly and picnicky with Nancy beside him. Instead, he felt homesick, or at least that is the way it seemed to him. Still, how could it be genuine homesickness when the object of his yearning was beside him? Nevertheless, there had been in his thoughts recently the picture of a certain small colonial house in Tutors' Lane, a house now for rent or for sale. Possibly, however, the contrast of such a life—the house would be furnished with highboys and gate-leg tables and oval, woven mats—with his present one at Mrs. Ruddel's furnished him with a genuine case of homesickness, after all. How perfect would life be in such surroundings! He liked to think of breakfast: He and Nancy, alone, except, of course, for the pretty, efficient maid—at their mahogany breakfast table. Nancy, busy with the coffee things at one end and he at the other—no, at the side—tucking away his grapefruit and bacon and hot buttered muffins and jam in the last few minutes before he dashed off up the hill to his eight-thirty. Good heavens, what a life that would be! He saw Nancy with the morning light on her hair and her pleasant, lively face—the nose with only the faintest possible trace of powder—bending over his cup; and then he realized that he was gazing at her now in the same position, only with the sunset light in her hair, and with a white porcelain cup receiving the coffee out of a thermos bottle, instead of a china cup from a swelling-silver pot.
"Careful Tommy, you are dribbling it all over me."
"Oh, Nancy, I'm so sorry. I ask you, isn't that stupid. Please excuse me."
"A little lemon or a hot iron or soap and water will fix it, probably," said Furbush.
Tom looked over at Furbush. He hated his liquid tones, like honey dripping on a blue plush sofa. "How the hell do you get that way?" he wanted to ask—then he rounded out the sentence with certain phrases which had been current among our heroes along all war fronts from Kamchatka to Trieste. Even a milder remark was happily averted, for at this point the potato which Mrs. Norris had been steadily roasting, burst into flame and had to be plunged into the fire; a grateful accident, for now she was willing to sit down on the camp stool brought for her and to confine herself to the slicing of the bread.